Winter’s End: Winter Black Series: Book Nine

by Stone, Mary

  The office phone continued to ring in his hand. Finally, someone answered, but he was quickly put on hold.

  He tried Autumn’s number next. It went straight to voicemail.

  Damn it! Autumn, where are you?

  “Call me!” he barked into Autumn’s phone, and hung up.

  “Excuse me?”

  For a moment, Aiden had forgotten about the office phone in his hand, and quickly turned his attention to it. “This is SSA Aiden Parrish with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I need a patrol car to do a thorough sweep of a parking lot, fast.”

  “What’s the address?”

  He rattled it off. “One of my agents is on the way there,” Aiden informed the dispatcher. “I want him to have back up when he gets there.”

  There would be interdepartmental hell to pay for this, but Noah’s life and Winter’s life might be in the balance. If Winter was still with Autumn, that added another vulnerable point. He’d call in every favor he’d accumulated over the years to make sure the three of them were safe.

  Life was filled with irony.

  They’d been looking for Justin, but Justin might have just found them.

  29

  Figured. Of course. Winter was just like the rest of them. Whore.

  I didn’t know who the big guy was. Not that it mattered. He had a key to her apartment. He was probably one of a dozen, maybe more than a hundred who traipsed in and out of her place, a line of men all wanting to use her. Or more accurately, waiting to be used by her. The way all women used men.

  As I watched, though, he came and went from Winter’s apartment fairly quickly. Which was strange.

  But even stranger was the way in which the guy acted. He seemed paranoid. No, more than that. He seemed to know.

  Know that I was watching. Waiting. Even though I knew he couldn’t see me. The dude had even drawn a gun once, turning and pointing it in my direction.

  Very strange.

  Had he been able to feel me watching him? Did he have some unholy devil whispering in his ear, telling on me? Or maybe he was one of those psychics who fed on the evil of the world?

  I almost left then, worried about the man’s ability to sense me being so close. But I wasn’t a coward. Grandpa didn’t raise a weakling, and I feared his wrath more than I feared being seen.

  So, I waited. I didn’t want to know what he was doing in there, what she was doing in there with a man who had a key to her apartment.

  I knew she wasn’t married. She still used Bill’s last name—Black. She had no right to it, and she hadn’t changed it, so she wasn’t married. She was just a whore.

  I’d settled back into my hiding place, expecting a long wait, but the man had left after only ten minutes or so, dressed in a different suit than he’d worn when he got there. His hair had been wet too.

  Something was wrong. He didn’t stay long enough for…anything. At least I didn’t think so.

  I took the paper I printed out from the library, the one that had her address and a little biography about Winter. It was a lookup feature on a website that cost me fifty dollars. It had been worth it. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I knew that. She was the reason Grandpa died. She was the reason Tyler died. She had a lot of blood on her hands, and she got away with it because she had a badge.

  And she let men into her apartment.

  I had waited until the man’s car drove off, and her caller left unsatisfied. Maybe he’d walked in on her and she was with a different man. Maybe there were a string of men waiting up there. It didn’t matter. I had six bullets in the gun and a box more in my jacket. I’d shoot all of them if I needed to.

  Being very careful not to be observed, I headed for the stairs. The blood pounding in my ears was deafening, and I found my hands twitching. That surprised me. Why should I be nervous? My mission was holy and just; she was the one that should have been nervous. Still, my hands didn’t know that, and they trembled.

  I knocked on the door. Hard. I was just another one of the men lined up for her, just another faceless stranger waiting for her to open the door so that I could…

  Gritting my teeth, I knocked again, louder. No one came to the door. Maybe he left because she wasn’t there.

  I pulled the knife out of the sheath attached to the belt on my side. It was an excellent knife, wide and thick, hard steel a good foot long with a reinforced tip. I slid the blade under the trim around the door and set it angled against the latch. The trim gave way under the blade and separated from the frame, the paint pulling off in jagged strips.

  I found the bolt on the lock and tipped the blade to one side so it would catch and popped the pommel with my hand. The door sprang open like it was on a spring. Sloppy. Here she was some big deal agent, and she had a cheap lock on her door that could let anyone in. Maybe that was the point. I walked in and closed the door behind me. The damage done to the frame wouldn’t be visible unless someone was right there, facing it. Looking for it.

  If anyone noticed something wrong and came to investigate, I’d put the blade through them. I didn’t mind.

  The apartment was neat. Spotless. I hadn’t expected that. A woman as loose as her, a woman that would give keys to men she wasn’t married to, should live in squalor. They should stay in a hovel as befitted their status of harlot. I looked around in surprise. I supposed that my half-sister was a very accomplished harlot, if she could pay for an apartment this nice.

  I walked around a little, touching everything. Large screen TV, teacups in the sink, milk in the fridge. I went through the drawers in her bedroom and found a surprise. One of the drawers contained men’s underwear. There were men’s suits in the closet, men’s shoes under the bed. So, she was living in sin with that man. There wasn’t a long line as I thought. There was just one man who was being corrupted by her.

  That didn’t make her any more virtuous. She was still a whore, but at least her evil had only poisoned one lost soul, and she wasn’t taking a bunch of others with her to hell. On the floor of the closet was a dark suit. His, I assumed. It was crumpled and stank like old sweat. On the other side of the closet, there were smaller suits. Women’s this time. Some of them had skirts, but most had slacks.

  The pants didn’t surprise me, the skirts did. It was a little late to pretend to be a proper lady when you were shacked up with some guy. I pulled a few out of the closet to look at. Those I threw onto the floor and stepped on as I went into the bathroom.

  Men’s shaving cream and razors, women’s hair care products, birth control pills. If there was even a hint of doubt about her propriety, this killed it. She was as my grandpa said she was, just a cheap whore like the rest of them. My resolution to kill her took on a new fevered pitch; I needed to do it for her sake as well as mine. This wasn’t just about revenge anymore. I needed to cleanse her from being a blight on humanity. The fact that she was my half-sister meant nothing to me. She was nothing more than an obstacle.

  I found a tube of lipstick. Grandpa said that the purpose of lipstick was to make a woman’s lips look swollen and larger, like when the blood goes to their sex when they’re in season. I opened the top and extended the red stick as far as it would go. It was shaped like a phallus, one she rubbed on her lips.

  She had to die. There were so many reasons now. I set the lipstick down, but only after I wrote her a message on the bathroom mirror. This time, she couldn’t steal my face and spread it over the television. This time, it was the message that mattered, not the video, not the shades and shadows that betrayed me. This time, it was all about the message.

  I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. It was well stocked. Winter certainly didn’t go hungry. That pissed me off too. What did she know of hunger? What did she know about your stomach being so empty it felt like it stuck to your spine? The people who lived here had never experienced real hunger pains, hadn’t known deprivation.

  Grandpa said that, “Through the fire are we forged,” and that, “Hunger pain brings us closer to God and th
e holy mission.” He was probably right. He usually was, but it pissed me off to see the wicked prosper. Sinners, heathens, and yet, they had the nice suits, the stocked fridge, the waste. Judging by the number of Styrofoam containers, they ate out a lot. All that food and it still wasn’t enough.

  I added gluttony to the list. A good and godly man like Grandpa had to tighten his belt, and that was an old battered belt at that.

  I found some Chinese food in a container and dumped it into a bowl and microwaved it. I walked through the house as I waited for the oven to finish.

  There were boxes under a table in the living room. They looked so out of place in the tidy apartment. I pulled one out and set it on the table and opened it as the oven dinged. I ate chow main while shuffling through the papers.

  The box was full of old records, all cross folded and stacked as if they’d been placed there as a system. I couldn’t make head nor tails out of most of the records, but there were birth certificates from nearly a hundred years ago and death certificates and papers chronicling marriages and divorces.

  There were some handwritten pages too. That was the key. Names I knew or had heard of and arrows and relationships that all pointed to Grandpa. So, the little whore was trying to be part of the family after all?

  I finished the Chinese food and carefully set the bowl on the chair next to me. I then upended the box of papers and dumped them on the floor. She wanted to claim she was part of the family, did she? Well, she wasn’t, no matter how she twisted the past, no matter how she perverted the records, she was no part of the family, of Grandpa, of Bill.

  I waded through the papers like I was walking through the surf, kicking up waves as they settled at my feet. It became a game, making the pages fly. I got one to land on top of a lamp, another slid under a cupboard. I thought of Singin’ in the Rain, the way that handsome fellow kicked up the water while dancing, but Grandpa said dancing was for men without balls, so I just ground the papers in harder, hearing them catch and tear under my feet.

  I took the empty bowl to the kitchen and washed it along with the fork I used. I found a pen and grabbed one of the pages from the floor and wrote a note that I left under the clean bowl before taking my leave. I was just about to leave the sinful apartment when I saw the flashing lights.

  They must have found my new truck with its shiny clean dashboard. I bit back the stream of swear words I wanted to say because Grandpa didn’t like it when I used some of those words. It wasn’t fair. I liked my new truck. It was a shame to lose it like that.

  It was okay. There were others. Hell, this was a big city, with dashboards all over the place. As I slipped along the shadows of the big apartment building and into the trees in the back, I reminded myself that I’d find another. I just needed to choose the one I wanted.

  Simple.

  30

  The headlights shone on a dilapidated pile of wood doing an imitation of a church. To Winter’s eyes, it looked as if they’d just arrived to see the entire thing lean over and collapse under its own weight. Not that anyone would mourn the demise if it did.

  Some of the boards on the side of the church were sprung, like the heaviness of the passing years had squeezed them free of the nails that once held them in place. She wasn’t sure, but it looked like something ran past the door, frightened by the glare of the headlights.

  Autumn halted the vehicle as close as she dared without inflicting damage on the car itself from the loose debris scattered over what used to be the parking lot. “Okay. We’ve seen it. Let’s go back.”

  Winter shook her head. “There has to be a reason that this came up in my vision. We drove a long way to get here. We’re not just leaving.” She reached for her cell phone and turned on the flashlight app. She looked at the screen for a moment. “I have zero signal.”

  “Me too.” Autumn showed Winter her phone.

  Indeed, instead of any bars at all, Autumn’s phone also showed a circle with a line through it, indicating there was no service. It was unusual to not catch even the most remote signal from some random tower somewhere. Winter supposed this far out in the country, there was no populace large enough for a cell service to care.

  “Well, let’s check the place out and get out of here. I’ll get you dinner at the first sign of a decent place to eat.”

  “I don’t think we’ll find much around here except maybe the roadkill of the day. Served on a hubcap with WD-40 sauce,” Autumn muttered, clearly not liking the look of the place.

  Winter laughed. “You’re in a mood.”

  “Yeah.” Autumn nodded vehemently. “I am. That mood is called ‘scared.’ You have no idea the feelings I’m getting off that place.”

  “You mean that the building is alive, and it doesn’t want us here? That feeling?”

  “All right.” Autumn’s eyes widened in surprise. “Maybe you do have an idea. I thought I was nuts and imagining it.”

  “No.” Winter opened her door, suppressing a shudder that had nothing to do with the blast of cold air infiltrating the car. “You may be nuts, but you’re not imagining it. This place doesn’t like us.”

  “And why are we willingly going in there? I think I just saw a rat. A giant rat.” Autumn pointed behind her.

  Winter turned to look, but whatever Autumn had seen was gone again. Figured. “Because,” Winter told her, “this place showed up in my vision. There has to be a reason for it.”

  “A warning, perhaps, a command to stay away? Hell, I’ll buy dinner, let’s go.” Autumn crossed her arms, ready to stare down the church itself if need be. Winter laughed and got out of the car. Autumn sat still a moment and then seemed to realize that Winter seriously intended to leave her alone. Not that Autumn really was scared. Much. She definitely had a weird look on her face as she joined her.

  Autumn’s expression was somewhere between a frown and a scowl. “I’m not kidding, Winter. The feelings I’m getting off his place.” She shuddered. “It’s not just the Addams Family paint job or the charming mold smell. This place really freaks me out.”

  “Duly noted.” Winter took a deep breath, trying not to show that she was becoming just as rattled as Autumn, if not more so. After all, it was her vision that had placed her here. That the place looked so exactly like she’d envisioned was jarring, to say the least. The blatant malevolent feel emanating off the building itself was just the icing on the cake.

  She stepped up to the double door and pushed. To her surprise, the wood refused to give. She tried the old brass push handle on the front, but the tab wouldn’t depress. She shone her phone light on a piece of paper that was tacked to the door. It was yellowed with age and impossible to read since the print had faded in the sun. She bent closer to get a good look at it.

  “What does it say?” Autumn asked.

  The wind was cutting through the layers of clothing, chilling her to the bone. Winter shivered. “Condemned.” She frowned and squinted at the faded print. “This place was condemned and scheduled for demolition,” she tilted her phone, trying to get more light on the faded words, “almost a year ago.”

  “I wonder what’s taking them so long?”

  Honestly, Winter would have preferred that the destruction of the place had happened a year ago. The place was a deathtrap. “It was probably lost in red tape,” Winter murmured, tilting her head back to look up at the steeple.

  “Wow.” Autumn activated the flashlight app on her phone. “How insignificant do you have to be when no one can even remember to come put you out of your misery?”

  Winter turned to Autumn, her eyes widening as a single word sang through her mind. “Oubliette.”

  “Come again?”

  “It was a form of torture,” Winter explained. “It means a ‘place of forgetting.” The prisoner was left to die, just ignored to death. That was running through my head, that word. During the vision, I mean. I thought that meant that this place was a place of forgetting, that someone or something here had been abandoned, but it was the church. It
was the building itself that was left and abandoned. This place isn’t the oubliette, it was left in an oubliette, this field, this dying town. We all ignored it, forgot about it. This is the very place where a serial killer spent his formative years, and we’ve shunned the building as though it’s to blame somehow.”

  Winter stood at the butt between the two great doors. In an explosive burst of energy that left Autumn screaming in surprise and backpedaling away from her, Winter dealt a strong blow in the crack between the doors. They flew open, the right one slamming on the door jamb as they shook and lay bare the contents of the room.

  “This is what I saw,” Winter said under her breath.

  Autumn let out a shriek and stamped her right foot.

  “What?” Winter shot her an impatient look.

  “Something ran over the top of my shoe,” Autumn said, her foot raised as she looked around for either a safe place to set the foot down or a target for her heel. Not that it mattered which. Either one would suffice in Winter’s opinion. Normally, neither one of them was so easily creeped out, but this place was seriously doing a number on them.

  Winter entered the building. She could feel Autumn hesitating behind her. Winter paused, trying to figure out just what made the place so foreboding. Maybe it was because it was so blessedly dark.

  Even with the car lights on bright and shining directly into the church, the light didn’t penetrate into the gloom. She shone her light overhead, visions of a wall of spiders ready to descend worrying through her brain, but there was nothing above her except wood.

  “Let’s split up,”

  Autumn protested immediately. “No. Absolutely not.”

  Winter kicked at a rotted floor mat just inside the door, sending up a cloud of dust. “We can cover more ground. It’s obvious no one is here…”

  “No.”

  “…and we’ll be sure that we get everything.”

  “No!”